Chasing la dolce vita

Homecomings, fantasies, food and ghosts – how the myth of eternal return keeps the Italian diaspora in a state of longing

All original watercolours by Emily Faccini

is a writer, translator and novelist. His books include The Water-Breather (2002), The Incomplete Husband (2008) and Other People’s Children (2026). He lives in London, UK.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

When he was a child growing up in Emilia-Romagna, my great-grandfather Marco once found an eagle fledgling that had fallen from its nest. He kept it warm in the folds of his shirt and ran home, only to discover as he undressed that the bird had eaten strips of his flesh, its beak tinged red with blood. The rescued eagle thrived in my great-grandfather’s care, its wingspan soon a remarkable length. And all the while, Marco himself grew immensely tall. Then, one day, without warning, the eagle flew away.

The moment my father told me this story when I was a boy, it lodged itself deep in my imagination. I pictured young Marco as a giant striding through the forests of north-central Italy, calling to the bird of prey, waiting in vain for it to land on his outstretched hand. Marco merged with the heroes of my illustrated classical civilisation books, earning his place between the busts of Roman emperors and the chapters on Greek mythology.

What I never realised was that this family legend held clues to who I am and to my relationship to Italy.

Lina Stores deli in Soho, London, has been a pillar of Italian life in England for decades. It’s where we’d sometimes meet our paternal grandparents when visiting London from our home in France. My brothers and I would line up in front of the refrigerated counter and ask for our favourite ravioli, doing our utmost to avoid any slip-ups in Italian that would make the staff wince: ‘ricotta e spinaci’, ‘zucca’, ‘funghi porcini’. Back at our grandparents’ flat, Nonna served the ravioli on an elaborately laid table, and my grandfather appeared with freshly grated Parmigiano. He’d sprinkle the cheese evenly over our pasta; never too much, nor too little. How he did this, and with such speed, we didn’t know. If we had spaghetti, Nonna would wrap her right hand around ours and twirl the fork with us so we held just the right amount, the bespattered tablecloth damning proof of our slapdash habits at home.

My grandparents trusted that these rituals of the table (they saw them as basic codes of Italianness, connecting displaced Italians everywhere) would allow us to paper over the differences in our ethnically blended and peripatetic family. In this way, we’d be able to claim Italian identity for ourselves, despite its competition in our lives with Englishness and Frenchness. It would anchor us, or so they believed, and prevent us being bullied and singled out.

Revving their Vespas and wearing clothes I’d have avoided, they couldn’t make head nor tail of me

Every summer, on car journeys to Italy we’d listen and re-listen to Italian songs and fairytales to drum the language into us. Once we’d crossed the Alps, any stopover became an opportunity for my father to immerse us in further knowledge. He kept a torch in his pocket, and in the stillness of churches he’d let the beam scurry over frescoes until it hovered, halo-like, above a painted face or a feature in the background. ‘Such bellezza,’ he’d whisper, ‘look at the beauty of that.’ In explaining Masaccio’s brushstrokes, or playing Verdi and Puccini arias at car-shaking volume, we sensed my father was offering us, his sons, yardsticks by which to measure life. He needed us to see ourselves as the inheritors of a civilisation unlike any other. Italianness was his gift to us.

In my teens, I spent a month in Florence looking after the child of a couple of scientists, colleagues of my father. My role was to speak to the boy in English; his parents’ job was to improve my Italian. The moment I was alone with the seven-year-old, he locked himself in his room and refused to come out. As a consolation, one evening, I was entrusted to a 16-year-old nephew who took me to join his friends in a packed central piazza. Within minutes, the assembled youngsters were trying to identify my hybrid accent, crowding round with questions, trying out their English: ‘Are you French or British?’ ‘Which football team do you support?’ ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ Revving their Vespas, blasting music I didn’t recognise, and wearing clothes I’d have avoided, they couldn’t make head nor tail of me. I escaped into Florence, only vaguely aware of where I was going. Leaning against a wall on the banks of the Arno, the Ponte Vecchio in the distance, I tried to convince myself that the surrounding ‘bellezza’ vaunted by my father was mine, that I fitted into the circus of Italian life I’d seen in Fellini films, but I felt I was a baffling anomaly, an impostor. The chameleon skills I’d always employed to fudge my way through existence had let me down. My hosts were in a state of panic on my return. Where had I been? I wasn’t going to be allowed out again. I’d failed as a childminder. And as an Italian.

A cousin recently emailed me photographs of my great-grandfather Marco, the first to set the family’s migrations in motion. I was surprised to see that he was as tall as the family legend of the eagle would have it, towering over others, but also that he was standing in front of what was the Italian Hospital in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, the place he’d apparently helped to run. This was the very spot in London I’d sat on many occasions when, as a student at King’s College, I’d search for quiet garden squares in which to read and revise for exams. I’d always believed I was drawn to the Italian Hospital because of its name. But I remember how, more than once, I’d had to get up and leave, overwhelmed by an inexplicable sadness. In another photograph, Marco was posing with my great-grandmother Delfina, also from Emilia-Romagna, on a patch of grass in Hyde Park. I recognised it immediately as the hidden slope leading down to the Serpentine........

© Aeon